Grams to Tablespoons.

Why a spoon holds different weights

A tablespoon is a volume. It is 14.7868 millilitres in the United States, which is half a fluid ounce. Grams measure mass. The bridge between the two is density, and density is a property of the ingredient, not of the spoon.

Water sits at 1 gram per millilitre, so a tablespoon of it weighs 14.79 grams. Butter floats around 0.96, so the same spoon gives you 14.19 grams. Honey is dense at 1.44 and lands near 21.28 grams. Cocoa powder is the other end of the scale, light and airy at roughly 0.343, so a tablespoon barely reaches 5.07 grams.

But density alone does not tell the whole story. Two powders with the same true density can weigh differently in the same spoon, because what fills the gaps between particles matters just as much as the particles themselves. That is why flour is the famous problem child of the measuring world.

One tablespoon of each ingredient, in grams

Sorted lightest to heaviest. The spread runs from 5 grams a spoon to 21, so a single conversion factor cannot answer this question honestly.

Liquids are measured with the spoon level and the surface flat. Powders get the spoon and sweep treatment, which is what the numbers above assume.

Common amounts converted

Grams down the left, tablespoons across for four ingredients people convert most often. These come straight from the densities in the table above, computed rather than typed.

Read the butter and honey columns side by side. At 500 grams the butter column says 35 spoons and the honey column says 24. If you had used one factor for both you would be off by eleven tablespoons, which is more than half a cup.

Fraction equivalents worth knowing

Most American recipes call for fractions rather than whole spoons, so it helps to know what a gram figure lands on. These are the benchmarks people reach for in a kitchen.

A stick of American butter is 113 grams and holds 8 tablespoons, which works out to 14.2 grams a spoon. That is why the butter row reads 14 in every serious conversion chart you will find.

When a tablespoon is not a tablespoon

The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia all print the word tablespoon on their cutlery, and none of them mean the same volume.

The converter above uses the US customary spoon of 14.7868 millilitres. If your recipe came from Australia the spoon holds 20, which is 35 percent more, so 100 grams of flour becomes 9.8 spoons rather than 13.3.

And the teaspoon problem runs alongside it. Everywhere except Australia a tablespoon is 3 teaspoons. Australian tablespoons are 4 teaspoons, which quietly breaks a lot of metric recipes copied into American books.

Why weights vary for the same ingredient

Two cooks can scoop the same flour from the same bag and end up eleven grams apart on a cup. In tablespoons the gap is smaller in absolute terms but proportionally just as large.

The usual cause is compaction. A spoon dipped straight into the bag and shaken level packs flour down. A spoon that gets filled and swept gently leaves air in the pile. Gold Medal, King Arthur and the USDA all publish slightly different flour weights because they each measured with a different technique, and every one of them is honest.

Powders with fine particles compact the most. Cocoa, powdered sugar and cornstarch all change weight noticeably when they settle. Oats and cornmeal hardly move, because their pieces are large enough that they cannot nest tightly. Liquids barely matter at all, since they cannot be compressed.

So the practical answer is a two part rule. Use the numbers on this page when you are converting a recipe you did not write, and use a scale when the recipe is yours and you want it to come out the same next time.

Questions cooks ask about this conversion

How many tablespoons is 100 grams of flour?

About 13.3 tablespoons, or a bit over three quarters of a cup. Flour comes in light at roughly 7.5 grams a spoon, so the count is far higher than most people expect when they first look it up.

Is a tablespoon of butter always 14 grams?

Close enough for cooking. The true figure is 14.19 grams from the standard American stick, which is 113 grams divided by 8 tablespoons. That rounds to 14 in every chart you will meet.

Why does my tablespoon of sugar weigh more than a recipe says?

Packing. A spoon pressed into the bag holds more sugar than one scooped and swept. If your recipe was written by weight, spoon the sugar in and level it rather than digging.

Can I use a soupspoon from the drawer instead of a measuring spoon?

Not reliably. Dinner spoons run anywhere from 10 to 20 millilitres, so your error could be a third either way. Measuring spoons cost a few dollars and remove the guesswork entirely.

How many grams is a tablespoon of honey?

Roughly 21 grams, the heaviest common ingredient in a normal kitchen. Honey is about 1.44 times as dense as water, which is why it slides off a spoon so slowly.

Is 15 grams the same as 1 tablespoon?

Only for water and thin liquids. Fifteen grams of oil is 1.1 tablespoons, fifteen grams of butter is 1.06, and fifteen grams of flour is a full 2 tablespoons. The gram figure is fixed, the spoon count is not.

Where these numbers come from

The tablespoon is defined as exactly half a US fluid ounce, which is 29.5735295625 millilitres divided by two, or 14.78676478125 millilitres. That is a definition rather than a measurement, so it carries no error at all.

Ingredient weights come from the density set this site maintains and publishes in full on the cups to grams page, where the method behind each figure is set out. Every gram value here is that density multiplied by 14.7868 and rounded, computed in code rather than typed by hand, so the table and the tool cannot drift apart.

Flour deserves one honest caveat. This site uses 120 grams a cup for all-purpose flour, which gives 7.49 grams a tablespoon. USDA FoodData Central lists 125 grams a cup, which would give 7.81 a spoon. King Arthur publishes 120 and Gold Medal publishes 125. Both camps are measuring a real thing, and the disagreement is about technique rather than arithmetic.

• NIST Office of Weights and Measures, metric kitchen equivalencies
• USDA FoodData Central, per cup gram weights
• Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the 20 millilitre tablespoon
• 21 CFR 101.9, a tablespoon means 15 millilitres for nutrition labelling
• The same densities in grams, with the full method Tablespoons to grams Grams to tablespoons
• Sugar grams per cup
• Grams to ounces
• Half cup in grams
• Flour grams per cup

Related converters

These run on the same density set.

• Cups to grams, 35 ingredients
• Cups to ounces, weight and volume
• Millilitres to cups, and the four cup standards
• Recipe unit converter
• How to scale a recipe up or down